[kthartic]

As a laymen, isn't the spectrum just 'less autistic tendencies' and 'more autistic tendencies'? Is this a myth, or does the spectrum refer to something else? I was always under the impression that some people could be more autistic than others.

[__s]

There are multiple dimensions

https://getgoally.com/blog/autism-spectrum-wheel

Along with many comorbidities (adhd, ocd, depression, etc) which are more likely but not requisite

This leads to the saying "if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism"

[AlexandrB]

> "if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism"

Isn't this true for just about any condition? It's not like people with ADHD or depression all behave exactly the same. I understand the urge to avoid categorizing people too broadly, but at the same time making the "taxonomy" of a condition hyperspecific is contradictory to having the label in the first place.

If saying "I have autism" has no descriptive power because this could mean a million different things, it seems like the term needs to be retired or narrowed to a specific set of behaviors/challenges.

[crisply5706]

Keep in mind that the current state of our knowledge of autism and other neurological conditions is still extremely new. Just 30 years ago, you would have been told that only young white boys exhibit autism.

There is debate within the autism community about ditching the catch-all term "autism", but I don't expect it to go anywhere. Broad labels like that are useful. I can tell a random person that I'm autistic and they generally understand that my "abnormal" behavior is innocuous. It's less useful to give a stranger a 30 minute lecture on my individual needs and challenges.

Read up on the controversy around asperger's and the "high/low functioning" dichotomy. These were standard measures for a long time and have only been dropped in the last ten years or so.

[ZeroGravitas]

I've heard it used exactly that way for ADHD.

But more widely, there's a bunch of conditions of varying severity that might be caused by being in a car crash. That doesn't make "I was in a car crash" a bad answer to "what happened to your leg/eye/speech", it's just a fact.

[posix_compliant]

Then the spectrum would refer to the magnitude of any vector in multidimensional “autism space”.

[__s]

Sure, but saying two people are the same magnitude is very different from saying they have the same level of touch sensitivity

Two complex numbers can have the same magnitude & be very far apart. Assuming we stick to the positive/positive quadrant it's not so bad. This metaphor (which, the spectrum itself is a metaphor, making this a metaphor of a metaphor) is to a 2d space tho, complex numbers are much more comparable based on magnitude as a result

[thaumasiotes]

> Two complex numbers can have the same magnitude & be very far apart.

Only if their magnitude is large; the maximum possible distance between two complex numbers of equal magnitude is double that magnitude.

And this limit is independent of the number of dimensions in the space you're working in; no two equal-magnitude vectors are ever farther apart than opposite vectors are.

If you stick to the first quadrant / octant / whatever n-dimensional division of space where all coordinates are positive... I don't think the number of dimensions makes any difference there either? Any two vectors define a plane (or a line, or, if they're both zero, a point), so two vectors in a 500-dimensional space can't be farther apart from each other than is possible for two vectors in a 2-dimensional space. Those 500-dimensional vectors are already embedded in a 2-dimensional space.

[SiempreViernes]

"very far" is of course relative: if we have tree vectors, two of length R and one of length 0.99*R, it's not outlandish to call the distance 2R between the two vectors of equal magnitude "very large" compared to the distance 0.01R between two vectors of dissimilar magnitude.

Your last comment is completely incorrect, for a point at (1,1,1,....) each extra dimension adds a constant 1 to the euclidean distance, so that in 500 dimensions a point at (1,1,1,....) is around 22.4 units away from the origin, while in two dimensions it is only 1.4 units away from the origin.

[__s]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwAD6dRSVyI 3Blue1Brown on visualizing higher dimensions explains it well

[thaumasiotes]

> Your last comment is completely incorrect

How so? Your followup makes no sense.

> for a point at (1,1,1,....) each extra dimension adds a constant 1 to the euclidean distance, so that in 500 dimensions a point at (1,1,1,....) is around 22.4 units away from the origin, while in two dimensions it is only 1.4 units away from the origin.

You're comparing vectors of different magnitudes. You could equally object that (200, 0) is much farther away from the origin than (2, 0) is. That's true, but so what? You're still in a two-dimensional space.

Are you under the impression that the "magnitude" of a vector and its "distance from the origin" are separate concepts? They aren't.

[Tarq0n]

The question is whether each dimension is equally clinically significant, or equally impactful to quality of life. Talking about magnitude is definitely taking the analogy too far, as temping as it is.

[kenjackson]

I think the point is that the magnitude being the same doesn’t necessarily mean their distance is zero. I think the rest isn’t relevant.

[bitwize]

Kinda like how color spectra have multiple dimensions as well: RGB, HSV, YCbCr, etc.

[card_zero]

Well color spaces, not spectra, technically. Brown isn't in the spectrum.

[pfannkuchen]

That name would make for a really interesting bar.

[hiciu]

That's exactly the issue, it is not as simple as "less" or "more" "autistic". I don't think I'll be able to explain it properly with my own words using english, sorry.

I'll just quote nih.gov:

> Autism is known as a “spectrum” disorder because there is wide variation in the type and severity of symptoms people experience.

and wikipedia:

> Autism is clinically regarded as a spectrum disorder, meaning that it can manifest very differently in each person. For example, some are nonspeaking, while others have proficient spoken language. Because of this, there is wide variation in the support needs of people across the autism spectrum.

and maybe take a look at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_disorder#Types_of_spe...

[kthartic]

I see, wikipedia's definition is quite informative here. Thanks